|
|
 |
| |
Former newspaper crime correspondent Duncan Campbell has drawn on his reporting experience for his new book, If It Bleeds |
Journalist Campbell hacking into the world of crime fiction
Duncan Campbell tells Peter Gruner about his new book and why we still need ‘foot-in-the-door’ reporters
If It Bleeds
by Duncan Campbell.
Headline Review
POOR old ace crime reporter Laurie Lane’s life couldn’t get much worse.
A hard-living hack working in the fast lane of a national newspaper, he’s been asked to write the memoirs of Britain’s best-known gangster and former associate of the Krays – one Charles Edward Kitchener Hook – when the bloke is suddenly murdered in his own Highgate mansion.
On top of that, Laurie’s wife, Caz, a country singer, has left him for an older man; the couple’s angst-ridden teenage daughter Violet is studying for her A-levels and needs keeping an eye on, and there’s an awkward little business about expenses claimed for entertaining so-called “contacts”.
Oh yes, and the smarmy git of a news editor thinks Laurie is not up to the job and wants him to transfer to motoring correspondent.
In If It Bleeds, Guardian journalist Duncan Campbell has produced an entertaining and fast-moving comedy about the real and unreal shared world of literary criminals, downtrodden journalists and police desperate to be seen to be doing a good job.
Among the journo’ reprobates is a veteran crime reporter in his seventies called “the Vicar”, so named because he once famously put on a dog collar in order to enter the home of a grieving family by posing as a priest.
“He [the Vicar] was wearing his usual clashing shirt and tie ensemble,” writes Campbell. “A pink tie that looked like the wallpaper in a downmarket Indian restaurant was offset by a maroon shirt with white collar.”
The Vicar is the font of all good bad jokes, essential to keep the hacks entertained while they hang about at the crime scene for hours on end waiting for tit-bits of information from the police.
He also has the skills of a shoplifter, being adept at obtaining two glasses of wine at once at a posh police charity night without the waiters noticing.
Example of Vicar wit: “Doctor comes into emergency and says to patient: ‘Where are you bleeding from?’ Patient says: ‘I’m from bleedin’ Romford’.”
Laurie is facing competition to get the story first, pressure to get at least some of it accurate, problems with daughter staying out late – and the news editor needs to talk to him.
“We’re living in a changing world,” says the news editor. “We all have to adapt, work for the paper and the web and learn new skills. I know you and some of your colleagues see yourselves as the old cowboys...”
When Laurie “flies a kite” by suggesting that the Russian mafia killed the godfather, based on a dodgy underworld tip, he brings condemnation and ridicule on his newspaper.
Scotland Yard immediately pooh-pooh the idea and all the other papers have a laugh at his and his paper’s expense. Even Violet accuses him of criminalising the Russian community. She has a Russian girl at her school who is extremely nice, but everyone thinks she’s very rich and her dad must be in the mafia – although he’s really a doctor at Great Ormond Street children’s hospital.
And now the heat is really on for Laurie to accept the motoring correspondent’s job, even though he knows absolutely nothing about cars.
Campbell, 64, himself a former crime correspondent, writes well about a subject which is obviously close to his heart.
Over coffee in Angel he tells me that with the arrival of so-called “citizen journalist” – anyone with a camera phone and access to the internet – the old-fashioned foot-in-the-door crime hacks, not to mention their newspapers, are under threat like never before.
Campbell says: “The Daily Telegraph used to have full-time court correspondents, but no longer. The Press Association had five or six full-time correspondents at the Old Bailey, now it’s two.
“You don’t get detailed court reports any more. People decided that readers won’t read them unless there’s a picture of Kate Moss half-way through.
“The space once given to crime coverage now goes to celebrity. There’s a long tradition of hypocrisy in the British media with people saying how awful this obsession with celebrity is, and then running another eight pages of the famous just to show how awful it is.”
And the old breed of rogue crime reporters are also dying out, he believes.
“These were the kind of hacks who, before the mobile phone, would go into a public telephone box, file their copy and then dismantle the phone so that the competition couldn’t use it,” says Campbell. “It all sounds quite amusing. But at the time if it was you who couldn’t find a phone that worked you were pretty angry about it.”
Campbell is planning to leave the Guardian, where he has worked since 1987, later this year to go freelance and concentrate on writing books. He was previously Los Angeles and crime correspondent for the paper. Before the Guardian, he worked for the London Daily News (now defunct), City Limits (ditto), Time Out and LBC radio.
•
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
